Gotta love this headline: “Computers are starting to reason like humans.”* Imagine the eventual consequences. Computers, formerly relegated to simple reasoning tasks and computation, will supposedly be able to discern complex relationships that we take for granted. And, if they are lucky, they will be able to reason just as perfectly as we do.
But do we reason in a way computers could reason? An event on a June, 2017, morning in Alexandria, Virginia, might motivate us to rethink what “reasoning like a human” actually means. A man apparently obsessed with hatred for a political party decided that shooting Congressmen on a baseball field was a rational choice. Reasoning like humans is apparently more than logic and the recognition of moving shapes. Do we really want to model computers on "human reasoning"?
Maybe computers reasoning “like humans” isn’t the valuable goal we reason that it is.
* Matthew Hutson for Science, June 14, 2017 for Science (online)
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/computers-are-starting-reason-humans
But do we reason in a way computers could reason? An event on a June, 2017, morning in Alexandria, Virginia, might motivate us to rethink what “reasoning like a human” actually means. A man apparently obsessed with hatred for a political party decided that shooting Congressmen on a baseball field was a rational choice. Reasoning like humans is apparently more than logic and the recognition of moving shapes. Do we really want to model computers on "human reasoning"?
Maybe computers reasoning “like humans” isn’t the valuable goal we reason that it is.
* Matthew Hutson for Science, June 14, 2017 for Science (online)
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/computers-are-starting-reason-humans
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